Tag Archives: activism

I’m really bothered by social media based activism. When did we as a culture decide we needed fads to inspire us to give?

I’ve had this topic sitting in my mind for a while. I wanted to pick a good time to post it – not in the middle of any frenzy where it could be taken as a knee-jerk reaction to any one trend, but still close enough for those examples to be fresh in our minds. As we come off the hype of the ice bucket challenge, I think now is a good time.

I’ll begin by saying that while I did not participate in the challenge myself (no one nominated me, thank goodness), my husband did. He did it for a lot of the same reasons other people did – someone nominated him, and he figured it wasn’t a bad thing to do. It became the topic of a lot of real-life conversations in the days that followed, though – how he was going to handle the financial aspect of the challenge, who he’d give the money to, and the involuntary aspect of being “nominated to give”.